Meet the 10 startups selected for Accenture FinTech Innovation Lab APAC

It’s the seventh year of Accenture’s annual Fintech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific (APAC) and the professional services major has picked 10 fintech companies to mentor. 

The companies, shortlisted from 162 entries across 30 countries, focus on data and analytics; digital bank solutions, emerging technologies, health insurance ecosystem and intelligent automation. 

The 2020 lab starts this week and ends in December.

“We’re seeing more firms accelerate their digital transformation journeys, and investors are increasingly looking at fintech solutions to help banks, insurers and payments firms improve how they operate and serve customers,” Ravinder Chhabra, managing director at Accenture and the executive sponsor of the FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific program in Hong Kong said in a statement. 

Accenture along with 19 other financial firms will closely work with the selected companies, fine-tuning their business models while giving them access to mentors from leading financial institutions. This will be done through a series of virtual meetings, user-group sessions, workshops and networking opportunities. Partnering financial firms for the program include  AIA International; Bank of America; BlackRock; Generali and Zurich Insurance Company among others.

Started in 2014 in Hong Kong, the Asia-Pacific chapter to date has received over a thousand applications. Its 49 alumni companies have raised around $525 million after participating in the programme, according to the statement. Accenture has modelled it on similar programmes it has co-founded in New York and London in 2010 and 2012 respectively.

Here’s a sneak peek into this year’s selected startups:

Fano Labs (Hong Kong) – Founded in 2015, the startup uses AI (artificial intelligence) for speech recognition and natural language processing technologies across a wide variety of languages and dialects. It’s helping enterprises with customer service, compliance and other lines of business.

KADA (Australia) – KADA’s AI-based platform, known as K, enables financial institutions to scale data knowledge across the organization.

Flybits (Canada) – Started in 2013, Flybits helps in digital personalisation of products and platforms at scale for the financial services sector. This includes banking, lending and wealth management services.

SPIN Analytics (United Kingdom) – Headquartered in London, five-year-old SPIN Analytics helps tier-one and digital banks improve credit risk management with its explainable AI-based platform.  It gathers data understanding customers, competition, analysing risk and running ‘what if’ scenarios to give actionable intelligence. 

Capitalise.ai (Israel) – An Israeli-based startup offering non-technical traders the ability to automate their trades, using free-style text with no coding needed. It converts free language text into complex algorithmic trading strategies, using natural language processing technology. 

Knight FinTech (India) – Based out of Mumbai, Knight FinTech provides an AI-powered, SaaS-based treasury management and credit assessment platform to help financial firms increase returns and decrease risk. Its interest rate and credit risk models analyze millions of data points to provide actionable insights.  

UVAS (Singapore) – UVAS is a securities exchange offering primary issuance of shares and debentures, secondary trading and optimized post-trade process, with automatic clearing, settlement and custody, all at 90-95% cost savings compared to other exchanges. 

Fedo (India) – Started in 2016, Bengaluru-based Fedo’s algorithm quantifies an individual’s risk for various diseases and his/her propensity to file a claim over the next few years, based on a photograph, enabling insurers to onboard and underwrite customers digitally with little to no manual intervention. It has helped its retail health insurance clients reduce underwriting costs by 50% and turnaround times by more than 70%.

Symbo (Singapore) – A Singapore and India-headquartered startup, two-year-old Symbo uses its proprietary digital insurance platforms to digitize insurance distribution in partnership with insurance companies engaging them with intermediaries, tied agents and financial advisors.

Staple (Singapore) - Staple’s cognitive AI-based solution helps reduce the costs of back-office operations, such as compliance and onboarding checks. By combining various back-end technologies, the solution can read, interpret and extract data from documents at scale, regardless of layout, format or language.